A Special Message from artist Francois Vaillancourt about THE STAND

A Special Message from artist Francois Vaillancourt about THE STAND

There’s been an overwhelmingly positive response to my illustration of Randall Flagg for the upcoming edition of THE STAND by Cemetery Dance Publications, and I thank you for that.

I have decided to go big and create a stunning poster to share with you my love of that book:

The poster is 20” x 30”, signed and numbered, with a limited run of 150 copies. I cannot guarantee you get a specific number (everybody wants #19!). The price is $120USD, including shipping to US and Canada, with tracking, and the poster is not framed. For other countries there are extra fees for shipping and tracking (I have to check with Canada Post for each individual shipping tube). Payment is via PayPal.

So if you ever wanted to have the Walking Dude stare at you all day long, here’s your chance. Email me at [email protected]

Francois Vaillancourt

Review: He Who Fights with Monsters by Francesco Artibani and Werther Dell’Edera

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cover of He Who Fights With MonstersHe Who Fights with Monsters by Francesco Artibani and Werther Dell’Edera
Ablaze (August 30, 2022)
144 pages; $24.99 hardcover
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

Francesco Artibani has long worked for the Walt Disney Company Italia, where he writes many tales for Topolino, PK, and W.I.T.C.H., of which he’s been a scriptwriter and story editor for three years, and has created the science fiction series Kylion. Werther Dell’Edera is an Italian comic book artist who provided interior art for the unreleased comic Aliens: Colonial Marines – Rising Threat for Dark Horse Comics, as well as Marvel Comics, and BOOM! Studios hit Something is Killing the Children. Their newest collaboration is the WWII graphic novel He Who Fights With MonstersContinue Reading

Video Visions: Happy 40th Birthday to Creepshow!

Black background with spooky lettering that says Hunter Shea Video Visions and the Cemetery Dance logo

I want my cake, Bedelia!

Hard to believe that one of the greatest horror anthologies of all time hit theaters forty years ago. In that span of time, I’ve had two dogs, three cats, two turtles, at least seventeen hamsters, three hundred goldfish and beta fish (most of them lasting two days), one salamander and one dwarf rabbit that grew to be the size of Gunnar Hansen. A big fuck you to the pet store clerk who sold me that bill of goods. Dwarf my ass. Oh, and I went from a virgin to way not a virgin, got married and had two amazing children. 

And now back to the real story. When I watched the coming attraction for Creepshow on TV and saw that it was the love child of Stephen King and George Romero, I believe I had a Bob Rossian happy accident in my skivvies. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead had rewired my brain a few years earlier and King was feeding me nightmare fuel every night before I hit the lights. His cocaine and booze years made for my caviar and champagne days and nights. Continue Reading

Review: Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney

cover of Daisy DarkerDaisy Darker by Alice Feeney
Flatiron Books (August 30, 2022)
352 pages; $23.99 hardcover; $14.99 e-book
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

They call Alice Feeney “The Queen of Twists.” It’s an apt title — Daisy Darker‘s revelations come at nearly a twist-a-chapter clip — but don’t let it fool you into thinking Feeney’s work is all about the gimmick. Her latest novel stands strong on its characters and setting; the constant game-changing revelations are the icing on an already delicious cake.Continue Reading

Review: Deserter by Junji Ito

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cover of Deserter by Junji Ito

Deserter by Junji Ito
VIZ Media (December 2021)
392 pages; $18.99 hardcover, $11.99 ebook
Reviewed by Danica Davidson

Deserter is a short story collection by Junji Ito, one of Japan’s most famous and successful horror manga creators. While you can see how he’s improved over time, the essence of his horror work is still here, and this is still definitely a worthy read.Continue Reading

Review: Over My Dead Body by Sweeney Boo

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cover of Over My Dead BodyOver My Dead Body by Sweeney Boo
HarperAlley (August 30, 2022)
240 pages; $24.99 hardcover
Reviewed by Joshua Gage

Sweeney Boo is a comic artist and illustrator living in Montreal, Canada.

When she’s not busy drawing witchy girls and hairless cats, she works with various publishers including BOOM! Studios, Archie Comics, IDW, Marvel, Image Comics and DC Comics. She is also the author and illustrator of graphic novel Eat, & Love Yourself. Her newest graphic novel is Over My Dead Body.Continue Reading

Dark Pathways: The Stories That Linger

Dark Pathways

cover of Children of ChicagoI just finished reading Cynthia Pelayo’s Children of Chicago, another of this year’s Stoker Award nominees for Superior Achievement in a Novel. I want more. I want ten more books. I want Pelayo to go comb through every single fairy tale she’s ever read and mine each one for the horror lingering between the words and turn each one into a story.

OK, I might be a little biased. I did, after all, write The Grimm Chronicles, so I have a little experience with modern-day fairy tales. But Pelayo is playing with a story that I entirely forgot about: The Pied Piper. From the book’s description:

Chicago detective Lauren Medina’s latest call brings her to investigate a brutally murdered teenager in Humboldt Park—a crime eerily similar to the murder of her sister decades before. Unlike her straight-laced partner, she recognizes the crime, and the new graffiti popping up all over the city, for what it really means: the Pied Piper has returned.

Part horror story, part murder mystery, Children of Chicago expertly weaves the tale of the Pied Piper into something truly horrifying. I know what you’re thinking: OK, the original story was already horrifying … after all, the guy just took a bunch of people’s kids! Yes, point taken. But incorporating any sort of myth or fairy tale into an original story can be an absolute disaster. It requires an understanding of culture, history, and, yes, meaning.Continue Reading

Review: Spinal Remains by Chad Lutzke

cover of Spinal RemainsSpinal Remains by Chad Lutzke
Cemetery Gates Media (August 2022)

143 pages; paperback $12.99; e-book $4.99
Reviewed by David Niall Wilson

This collection is a not-so-friendly neighborhood of stories. Chad Lutzke has crafted all the pieces in this collection around ordinary, everyday people, places, neighborhoods, relationships, and then taken them to strange, and at times very dark places. Often, it’s the matter-of-fact reactions, the unexpected ways the characters play off one another and interact, that are most disturbing.Continue Reading

Review: Dirt Creek by Hayley Scrivenor

cover of Dirt CreekDirt Creek by Hayley Scrivenor
Flatiron Books (August 2022)
336 pages; $25.19 hardcover; $9.99 e-book
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

On page three of Hayley Scrivenor’s excellent Dirt Creek, the body of 12-year-old Esther Bianchi is exhumed from a shallow grave. From there we journey back a few days and watch as her disappearance, and the subsequent investigation into it, causes ripples through a small Australian town.

I know small towns, because I’ve lived in them my whole life. Scrivenor may be writing about Australia and I may be living in Alabama, but location is the only difference between her rural and my rural. If you’ve never lived in a small town, Hayley sums up the experience perfectly with one sentence:

Everything and everyone touching everything else.

I about shouted “Hallelujuah!” when I read that, because it’s so true. That line comes near the end of the book, and rang so true after having spent several days in Scrivenor’s creation, watching how the characters’ lives and decisions wind around each other in an ever-tightening noose of comfort and danger.

Scrivenor tells her story through a variety of characters, including poor Esther’s parents, her friends Ronnie and Lewis, the detective struggling to learn the town and find the killer (all while dealing with a recent loss of her own), and finally with a collective voice — a “We” — employed to give the perspective of the community as a whole. These are people you will suspect, pity, grow frustrated with and weep with. These characters are the lifeblood of the town and the lifeblood of this story.

Esther’s death is a tragedy, but it’s far from the only one this town suffers in a matter of hours and days. Scrivenor makes you feel each one, makes you wallow in the waves of hope and despair, forces you to feel the impact of Esther’s death. Thankfully, we also get glimpses of the impact Esther’s life had on those around her. She is a small but necessary light in this otherwise grim tale.

I can’t wait to see what Hayley Scrivenor does next. Dirt Creek is highly recommended.

Review: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher 

cover of What Moves the DeadWhat Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher 
Tor Nightfire (July 2022)
176 pages; $17.99 hardcover; $6.99 e-book
Reviewed by Haley Newlin

The dead don’t walk.

There is a place secluded by an untenable smog, a 30-foot drop lake, and shrouded with acrimonious fungi. Some say it is the place the devils dance on moors. Others say at this ancestral residence, The House of Usher, they can hear the worms in the earth, craving flesh. Continue Reading

FREE FICTION: “Even When You Try” by Bruce McAllister

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Even When You Try
by
Bruce McAllister

She insisted from the first time we met — which was after work, at a diner on Melrose, looking at each other down the counter and speaking at last — that she was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, and in the end I did believe her. At first, I didn’t know what she meant. I hadn’t looked at her eyes enough. I hadn’t yet discovered the mole she kept covered with make-
up. She was an exhibitionist, sure, and beautiful, and could do things to you with her voice the way MM could (or so they say), but I didn’t really know what it meant for someone to live every day like that, being someone else, someone who’d died, who’d killed herself. I didn’t know she’d beg me to take her to plays and at intermission look for erudite men who (like Arthur
Miller, the first husband) might be playwrights. She’d say, “Let’s go talk to that guy — the one with the wool jacket.” Because she was so pretty, the guy would’ve already noticed her and didn’t mind our approaching him, didn’t mind talking to us, or to her. I didn’t know it would mean that even when we were just walking down Santa Monica Boulevard she’d be looking for guys with faces like that baseball player, Joe DiMaggio. It was sad how desperate she was, as if looking for her first love, or only love, or a father she’d lost.  She’d wear dresses the wind could move easily, and she’d stand over grates in the street (LA does have a few) waiting for her dress to be blown up by the wind and paparazzi to appear suddenly and take pictures, but it never happened. She just stood there waiting. She hung pictures of Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy — both of them — in our bedroom on Helena Court, and looked at them sometimes; but when she did, it made her cry, though she wasn’t sure why, she said.  She hadn’t known Bobby all that well, she said.  When she was unhappy, the sex was great, as if she could forget herself just a little, but I also know she wanted, in the middle of it, to call me by a name other than mine. She never did.  She didn’t want to be that cruel even if the entire thing — being a famous person instead of just a girl from the old housing tracts of Torrance — was a living hell for her, even if I didn’t matter really who I was because I wasn’t any of the guys she actually wanted and needed, any of the guys who could have kept her from killing herself and didn’t. I just wasn’t, so when the time came, I helped her with it. It was the least I could do.

Bruce McAllister is an award-winning West-Coast-based writing coach, writer in a wide range of genres, consultant in the fields of publishing and Hollywood, workshop leader and an “agent finder” for both new and established writers. As a writing coach, he specializes in all kinds of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and screenplays.

Review: The Shark Is Roaring — The Story of Jaws: The Revenge by Paul Downey

cover of The Shark Is Roaring: The Story of Jaws: The RevengeThe Shark Is Roaring: The Story of Jaws: The Revenge by Paul Downey
BearManor Media (August 2022)
200 pages; $37 hardcover; $27 paperback
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand

I haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen the house that it bought my mother and it’s marvelous. — Michael Caine

Paul Downey opens The Shark Is Roaring: The Story of Jaws: The Revenge with this quote from Michael Caine, and I think it’s the perfect summation of the movie’s place in the Jaws franchise — it’s the one people think the least of, including many of the people who worked on it.Continue Reading

Review: Cults: Inside the World’s Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them by Max Cutler with Kevin Conley

cover of CultsCults: Inside the World’s Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them by Max Cutler with Kevin Conley
Simon & Schuster (July 2022)
416 pages; $22.63 hardcover; $14.99 e-book
Reviewed by Haley Newlin

We’ve seen it for generations: a well-spoken, charismatic person derails the ingrained ideals of humanity. Take the most horrific war leaders of World War II, like Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. Both men, with bloodied hands and a lack of empathy to such outlandish extents that many have argued exemplified psychopathy, not only led their armies down a wretched road of antisemitism, barbarity, and murder but did so with their recruits’ eagerness and even enthusiasm.

The same question is often asked throughout history, whether regarding dictators, crime bosses, or cult leaders: Why do people go along with this?Continue Reading

The Cemetery Dance .99 Summer Kindle Sale!

Hi Folks!

We wanted to let you know about our summer eBook sale! The following five titles are on a Kindle Countdown Sale which ends August 7! We plan to make these eBook sales a quarterly event, to highlight our impressive eBook backlist, and raise more awareness for these fine works of horror and dark fiction!

Voices At Midnight: Tales of Horror and Madness by Christopher W. Clark

Voices at midnight can be unsettling, especially if you didn’t think someone else was in the room, or if it’s a dreaded phone call that wakes you from a peaceful sleep. In this debut collection from Christopher W. Clark, disturbing voices will tell you:

  • how to make offerings (of a sort) to lake monsters
  • or, directions to strange old churches and their weird congregations
  • or, what you must do to avoid the gaze of Black-Eyed Susan
  • or even, about the secrets of old roads and their evil hitchhikers.

Listen to Voices at Midnight at your peril…

cover of Voices at Midnight

And the Night Growled Back by Aaron Dries

They shouldn’t have run.

There are three of them, Sam, Lila and Paul—young travelers with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and yet, everything to lose. Their visit to Iceland has invigorated their senses…until the carnival. There, a single punch is thrown. A man lies dead on the ground. Blood speckles Sam’s bruised knuckles. In a blind panic, they flee the scene and disappear down an unpaved road, winding through the barren landscape.

Soon they find an empty cabin, the perfect place to hide. Twilight turns to night. All is still. It is then that the travelers realize they are not alone. Something is lurking out there. In the dark. They can hear its growls. And to the creature, the guilty and the innocent taste exactly the same.

“Like [The Fallen Boys], this new piece takes relatable actions and emotion – in this case anger, jealousy and panic – and spins them into horror that is as tragic and effective as anything based in the supernatural… And then, just about the time we’re locked in to thinking this is a straightforward piece about how a moment of anger and aggression can change everything, Dries flips the story upside down, turning it into a shocking and violent siege story that kick starts an adrenaline-fueled finale.” – FearNet.com

cover of And the Night Growled Back

Midnight Rain by James Newman

Midnight Rain is a dark coming-of-age novel in the vein of Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life and Stephen King’s “The Body” (Stand By Me). It is a tale of growing up in the South, a reflection of boyhood and all its wonders, and the story of how one boy deals with a terrible secret that threatens to tear apart both his family and hometown.

1977… In a small town called Midnight, North Carolina, twelve-year-old Kyle Mackey ventures toward a strange new world called manhood… Kyle’s older brother Dan is going away to college. The night before Dan’s flight leaves for Florida, Kyle visits what he calls his “Secret Place” — an old shack in the woods bordering Midnight.

But Kyle stumbles upon something that proves his favorite spot in the world is neither as private nor as innocent as he once thought…

It begins with the naked, battered corpse of a young woman. And, standing over her, a man Kyle knows…

“A smashing dark debut that kept me turning pages.” – Ed Gorman

cover of Midnight Rain

Head Space & Other Uncomfortable Surroundings by James Cooper

The dark space inside our head, where reality mutates, where the people and places we trust no longer exist. This is the landscape of eternal terror, inhabited by creatures we can’t even name. It is the place we fear, and the place we belong, where our private horrors endure…

James Cooper has rapidly developed into one of the most distinguished writers of contemporary horror fiction of his generation. His stories possess a rare insight into human nature and capture the voices of those who feel at odds with the world, their strange tales resonating long into the night, leaving the reader profoundly moved. The stories collected here offer a unique view of the family dynamic and are frequently disturbing. Don’t say you haven’t been warned…

cover of Head SpaceThis House by Benjamin Kane Etheridge

What makes a haunted house? The unsettled spirits of the dead? Or the unsettled spirits of the living?

When Joey Lodge sustains a severe brain trauma, his delusions take the form of an alien spirit that guides him in the creation of a haunted house. He begins to populate the house with ghosts of his choosing, from family members to criminals, until the line between fantasy and reality blurs and even his delusions start fighting back. As terror in the house ratchets up to a maddening pitch, the alien spirit has one shocking revelation still in store…

cover of This House

As always, thank you for your support!